Sometimes you’ll never know the
answer, and that’s alright.
I’m sitting
at our tiny kitchen table drinking orange juice and looking up at my mom, watching
as she leans against the kitchen sink twisting her wedding ring around her
finger and wondering what thought she has spinning through her head.
I have so
many memories like this, stories and images I’ve clung to and searched to find
the meaning in years later. What good is that though? There are definite aha moments
when a situation you could never make sense of suddenly becomes clear some time
later. It’s usually completely out of the blue, and you end up feeling
incredibly foolish, or maybe that realization ends with you high-fiving
yourself--either way, it’s a load off. But then there are those pesky
parenthetically thought through situations you’re constantly toying around
with, unable to ever find that perfect fit. You can’t overanalyze when you
haven’t given yourself any real solid ground to grow from, it just doesn’t
work. Any meaning you make is just that, made up. You have to remember that.
You’re stuck in this limbo until you do of guessing and gun jumping and getting
absolutely nowhere.
"Do
you ever see people running incredibly fast and wonder if they're running to
something or away from something? The answer is always both."
Go for a
run; it’s far better than sitting still.
Make your own mayhem; stealing
someone else’s is plagiarism
“And true
it’s quite a trick to tell the dancers from the dance.”
It’s easy
to get caught up in chaos, to let what surrounds you become your reality, as
opposed to picking the positives and otherwise disengaging. In talking to the
moms I’ve nannied or babysat for over the years, this is one fundamental
they’ve mastered that I’m still struggling to grasp. I guess with so many
voices screaming in either ear, you become this finely tuned filter, able to
instantly address or dismiss, but never let linger. We all have our own
shit—peanut butter allergies, overdue rent checks and library books, fish we
forgot to feed...and then you think about your mom, or your best friend, or
your dog, and the daily annoyances and frustrations those lives incur, and adding
those to yours just sounds insane. Yet, we let ourselves do it anyway. We get stuck
in someone else’s dance, trying to watch their feet while we watch our own,
making sure they all fall in the right places at the right times. I think
life’s all about finding rhythms in relationships, that you learn how much or
how little to take in and give back. I don’t think it’s an effortless process,
but I do think it’s an essential one to have happen at some point. It probably
requires a lot of meditating and caffeine cutting which already sounds like a
drag.
And that's all there is, there isn't any more.
So I don’t
know where it came from, but whenever my sisters and I have no response for our
behavior, we say, “I do what I want...like a rockstar!” And somehow that’s
sound reasoning for stealing your expertly crafted grilled cheese or ruining
the end to Harry Potter. Really it’s just our way of saying--this isn’t me,
this is some exception, so we can laugh about it later.
Aside from
siblings, I think it’s rare to be stuck with someone for so long you see almost
all there is to them. Having had 26 solidly sister-filled years, it’s fair to
say that those are the relationships I (and they, I’d assume) know best.
Outside of that is where it gets a little murkier; how can you truly know
someone when we all have these sides with varying shades seemingly beyond comprehension? The answer is that you probably
can’t, but you can be an expert on any of the relationships you share. You can
learn dynamics, what traits or selves you feel surface when surrounded by
certain personality types.
What’s in
all of us, what we give off, is greatly due to who we’re with and how they are
responding to us. We’re instinctively adjusting our actions, taking
precautions, resetting out boundaries, talking in codes we’ve created without even realizing it. We all
do this. It’s not that we’re these sensitive tightrope-walking type of
conversationalists, but we’re all at least a little aware. I’ve found some
people are aware of only themselves, some are only aware of others, and few are
aware of both.
"I watch the world spin by every day and it's filled with curiosity,
All of these people looking for someone to notice a world they see"
